Displaced - Day 4

He glanced at the kitchen wall clock. The operation was to begin in earnest in another couple of minutes. He finished the coffee, then poured a third. It was just about time to do something about that lack of funds.

He returned to his desk and brought out the equipment again, sipping his drink while waiting for the temporal hub to re-establish contact with the future. When his connections sprang to life across the displays, he strangled the urge to check Silvia’s location and status. When working with skimmers, don’t be stupid and access stuff you want to keep hidden, he thought.

He had no reason to think the other skimmers had any interest in his sister, but he had no reason to think they didn’t, either. At the very least she could give them a link to him, one he’d prefer they didn’t catch wind of.

“Let’s move.” The chat message appeared and he swiped it out of his way, launching the tightly coordinated infiltration operation into action.

Within thirty seconds, skimmers from around the world had latched on to ephemeral streams of data in and around the Goldstream. They blocked data streams, substituting carefully crafted streams of the skimmers’ devising to defeat banking system security.

While they handled the security, Charlie struck deep into the Goldstream, skimming the tiniest amounts from randomly chosen accounts among the billions represented. The money funneled itself through a labyrinthine maze of accounts manned by other skimmers before finally coming to rest in the account they’d set up for the operation. They were accomplishing a skim the likes of which nobody’d been able to pull off before.

But nobody else had gear like he had.

He sent out some extra skims to top off his own accounts. It was risky; his gear could handle the security behind the screen the other skimmers had set up for the main op, but his account didn’t have the additional cover of the account maze. A slow smile crossed his face as his personal total ticked up quickly. Risky, but worth it.

All that electronic money would’ve made him a billionaire in the 1930s, even adjusting for inflation. As it was in 2041, he and his sister could live off it for years, maybe even a decade.

Within four seconds, the whole operation was over. The skimmers’ connections cut out, security was reestablished as if nothing had occurred.

“That’s that. Good job, guys,” Charlie typed. There was no reply. He frowned. He had a bad feeling. On a hunch, he tapped an icon representing the feed from a video feed he’d left in 2041. It was set to monitor the physical location of his ‘net signal; the same physical location he occupied in the 1930s, in fact, after you adjusted for the movement of the planet, and the solar system, and the galaxy, and the expansion of the universe itself.

The building had been converted into office space at some point in the future, but it was old and abandoned in ‘41. His feed gave him a real-time view of the area. He switched it on just to see the door into the room explode with bullet strikes seconds before masked figures kicked the remains down.

He cursed as he watched them search. They’d find the microscopic cameras seeding the area quickly enough, but that was all they’d find. The source of his ‘net connection was on his desk, more than a hundred years in the past. But it meant that someone was on to him. If they could localize his signal that precisely, it was possible they’d traced his activity and had some idea of what he was capable of.

It also meant he’d have to shift his physical connection point before he could return to 2041. For the time being, he was stuck.

Displaced - Day 3

He unclenched his hand; his knuckles had gone white on the cup’s handle. Silvia was fine for the moment. “For the moment,” he said aloud, letting the irony wash over him. Technically she hadn’t even been born yet, wouldn’t be for almost a century. Their great grandparents, maybe even great-great grandparents were probably walking around about now.

His point of temporal reference was fixed in relative time. If he spent a week in 1930, a week passed in 2041. If there was a way to change that, he didn’t know the equipment well enough to make it work. “Not that I’d change it if I could. Makes using the temporal hub a whole lot easier.”

Slipping into other times was new tech, not even leading edge. It was firmly on the bleeding edge. He’d cracked it though, siphoned off the tech from a top global corp’s military-contract think tank. As far as he knew, nobody knew he had it, let alone knew that he’d made the tech and actually time-slipped. He’d grabbed some flashy, lower grade files at the same time to prove he’d done it; he’d cemented his skimmer rep with it. But the time tech, that he’d kept.

Initially he’d hoped to try the classic time travel gambit with it. Go into the past, deposit a penny in the bank, come back to a big fat bank account in the present. When it hadn’t worked, the feeling of defeat had been soul-crushing. He’d tried all kinds of tiny experiments to see what had happened; hiding objects in places he was sure wouldn’t be disturbed, all that stuff you see in old videos. None of it worked. Nothing he did in the past changed anything at all in the present.

Eventually he’d given up on that angle. There was an idea the scientist types had come up with that changing the past would create alternate futures. All he’d managed to do was to maybe make some other version of himself really rich.

Displaced - Day 2

He spent the rest of the morning doing his job, if you could call it one. Things were tight back home in ‘41. Good paying, legitimate jobs were few and far between. He was a skimmer, someone who trolled the constant stream of internet traffic for vulnerable transactions, those that could be intercepted, and most importantly, those that could be modified.

Internet security was said to be a bit of an oxymoron by those in the skimmer community, though it’d gotten far better than it had been when the ‘net was in its infancy. The rise of the mesh-net architecture had been both a blessing and a curse to skimmers; mesh-net had seen the end of big centralized authorities on the internet, which made for fewer big, tempting targets. But it also meant greater personal responsibility for security, and weaknesses always flourished under conditions like those.

The sad fact was that even by cheating the system and preying on the unwary, he couldn’t earn a living, and so he’d taken to living in the past. Literally.

A blinking visual alert dragged him out of his reverie. Incoming message, on a quantum-encrypted key.

“Hey yo Skeeve, you asleep at the slate today, or what?”

He cursed under his breath. “Yah, sorry man, early alarm, only on my first caf, you know how it is.”

“Get wit it, we got other skimmers waitin’.”

He wasn’t kidding. There were several teams worth of them, waiting on his unique combination of skills and gear to break through the protection on the Goldstream, skimmer slang for the shifting trails of data that wound their way through the digital banking networks of the mid-twenty first century.

“I’m on it, I’m on it.” His fingers stabbed at the screen harder than necessary, and he took a deep breath.

“You better be. This don’t go down right, you know who’s catchin’ the blame.”

He snorted. Empty threats. As far as he knew, they didn’t know any more than his online handle, Skeeve, and nobody knew where, or especially when, he was. Time hopping wasn’t something just anyone could do.

He rubbed his hollow cheek in thought as he shut the conversation down. Hitting the screen control, he stashed the equipment back in the crate and returned to the kitchen for more coffee. He was going to need to be sharp and alert for this operation. He needed the money bad if he wanted any hope of being able to return full-time to the present.

He sipped the coffee appreciatively. There was plenty to like about living in the past. Things were generally simpler, and a lot of things, especially coffee, seemed to taste a lot better. He’d brought enough supplies back with him that money wasn’t an issue in the bad economy of the 1930s. He’d almost be tempted to settle in permanently if it weren’t for Silvia.

His sister was several years younger than him, and still living in the high school student shelter. She’d be graduating in ‘42 though, and then she’d be turned out to fend for herself. They were on their own; he had to take care of her.

Displaced - Day 1

The mechanical ring of his alarm clock splintered his dreams, slowly and painfully dragging Charlie back to the world of wakefulness. He flailed an arm toward the source of the sound, finally silencing it with the slap of a palm.

He glanced over to check the time, but couldn’t see anything. “Stupid mechanical clocks,” he grumbled. He’d have given a lot to be able to use his phone, but it was too risky. He’d forget and leave it out, and it’d be seen. Not worth it.

He dragged himself out of bed and through the shower, which got him about halfway to wakefulness. Showers, he thought, are worth giving up the phone. And a lot more, come to it. It’d been a long time since he’d lived in a place with a functioning shower, much less one that he had all to himself.

He threw on a robe and turned on the mechanical percolator he’d prepared the night before to make his morning’s coffee. The machine plugged in to the city’s electrical grid, a luxury many of the people around him would be jealous of. It still took him some getting used to the idea that things needed wires to draw power.

Coffee perking away and filling the air with delicious scents, he opened the front door and collected the paper. It was 4:30am, according to his kitchen clock, yet the paper was already delivered. Remarkable. He returned to the kitchen and put his copy of The Herald, Saturday edition, on the table. March 1st, 1930. The headlines were full of doom and gloom about the depression. A lot of the bad effects had yet to be felt, he knew, but he tossed the paper aside. He didn’t need it.

He poured a mug of the strong-smelling brew and looked around almost furtively. The apartment was small for a two-bedroom place. The kitchen and living room were small and combined, with one bath and two bedrooms leading off of the living side of the room. It got no light even in the day, but it served his needs and then some. Considering where he’d come from, it was a paradise.

He stirred milk into his coffee and sipped, wincing at the heat but sighing at the relief of the caffeine working its way through his system. He turned and crossed the room to the other bedroom, which he’d set up as an office.

Shutting the door behind him, he set the coffee on a large flat desk next to the sole window in the room. The shades were drawn; he left them drawn at all times.

From under the desk he drew a small wooden crate and removed the top. Inside it was padded with wads of newsprint, collected from several weeks worth of The Herald. He rummaged under the padding until he found the tools of his trade; his smart phone, a larger format tablet computer, and a small but bulky temporal hub.

The temporal hub had one whole side dedicated to a status display. He tapped some controls on the display and waited for all the indicators to turn green. His tablet and phone, dormant until now, suddenly burst into life. Their screens turned on, time displays updated, notification counters ticked upward as contacts tried to get hold of him by mail or other means.

He sipped his coffee again and sighed in satisfaction. He was home again, at least virtually. He was reconnected to 2041.